


i think i'm dying here

by piggy09



Series: Obscure Word Fics [16]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Helena warnings, LOOK BAD THINGS HAVE HAPPENED TO HELENA AND I MENTION THEM, Reference to canon abuse, reference to canon violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 23:20:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3187019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is trying so hard to be the sister Sarah needs her to be: one who doesn’t have suffering written on her skin large as scars. Just like that. Just like scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i think i'm dying here

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt on Tumblr:  
> "Orphan Black | Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from, and what they do for a living."
> 
> Those obscure sorrows, man. They are a _mouthful_. 
> 
> Anyways, this isn't anything but me just doing some venting through writing Helena for approximately fifteen hundred words. Don't go into it expecting anything resembling a plot.

Every minute Helena spends with Sarah is another minute of holding-back – she tucks secrets and little pains behind her teeth like sugar she is saving for later, feeling it rotting away at the bone, feeling it making her mouth _ache_.

 _Sarah_ , she says, _they took something from inside of me_. _Sarah_ , she says, _Sarah_ , she says _Sarah_.

 _Sarah, I am afraid_.

She still remembers how Sarah’s arms and legs had shaken when Helena cut the zip ties around Sarah’s wrists, the sawing sound of blade-through-plastic filling the silence. She remembers Sarah falling into her arms because it hurts not to – hurts, every second that Sarah’s weight is not boneless in her arms. Rotting away at the bone. Making her skin _ache_. Sarah they took something from inside me Sarah I am afraid Sarah I _miss_ you, miss you, please come back.

Come back, go back, she remembers before that too: remembers leaning her own weight on Sarah, the way her own wrists were bound by zip ties and how Sarah had helped her down every single step from the ship, like her weight would always be there, helping Helena fall in her own broken way from her own broken heaven. She remembers, too, the feeling of Sarah forcing her into the trunk; she remembers Sarah helping her fall, again and again and again, down staircases, away from sniper rifles, falling.

Never catching, though.

Every minute Helena spends with Sarah she can feel her steps grow more unsteady – the point is this, the point is that Helena is so _tired_ , and aching for someone to catch her. Sarah I am afraid, I am afraid, I am afraid, but: she doesn’t know how to open her mouth, and let the words out. The syllables wriggle around her mouth and hide behind her teeth; when she sends her tongue after them she hits another stickysweet patch of old fears—

(waking up in the middle of the night shaking because she’d rolled over on her back again and the sheets had wound around her ankles and she was so sure she was being held down, braced herself for the probe, _youareboundtogetherbeforeGodamenamenamenamenamen_ and she wakes up shaking, paralyzed, filled with an urge so deep to go to Sarah for help that she can’t make her limbs move. Go. Ask her.

But what if she says no? _Helena go back to sleep it’s alright Helena go back to sleep oi I’m tryin’ to sleep here Helena go back to sleep it was nothing, your dreams are nothing, nothing nothing nothing_ and Helena can’t do it, can’t make Sarah hate her like that.)

—and she gags on the taste, says nothing.

And now Helena is home (Sarah is home) (understand that to Helena, Sarah is home) and Sarah is trying, she knows, to make the two of them something like sisters – Helena gets it, she does. If you have suffered, and you are safe now, it makes sense that you would want to stop suffering, put your hurt and anger and despair in a box and put that box in a cellar, lock it up so it can no longer be _your_ hurt and anger and despair. Sarah-and-Helena watch movies sometimes, eat meals with Sarah’s other sisters (Sarah’s other sisters) (other) (sisters), Sarah laughs and Helena smiles and pictures scooping Sarah’s smile out of her face with a spoon and eating it.

She wouldn’t. She is _good_ like that, she is trying so hard to be the sister Sarah needs her to be: one who doesn’t have suffering written on her skin large as scars. Just like that. Just like scars.

It’s just that Helena wishes they could bare these old hurts first – she loves Sarah more than anything, and each time Sarah embraces her or tucks a strand of hair behind her ear is worth a thousand thousand deaths. But. Instead of talking about their days, or the movie Helena watched alone in a ball on the couch, or Cosima’s recovery, she would like to grab Sarah’s hands with her own and talk about _Helena_. And her recovery. And if she _can_ recover.

She doesn’t know if she can recover.

Helena has never told anyone about her hurts, and they are eating her alive: Maggie knew, and Tomas knew, and Henrik knew, and MaggieandTomasandHenrik are gone.

(Grace knew.)

(Grace is gone.)

She has never told anyone about her hurts – doesn’t know how, but knows she can’t carry the entirety of Helena alone. She needs to drag her bleeding-broken-body to someone and say: _when I was seventeen I spent three days in a cage and some days I still wake up with my mouth tasting like metal – how do I move on from that? How do I eat chocolate cake when I have eaten rats and bread stolen from the mouths of nuns?_ If only someone would tell her _how_. If only she could ask.

And sometimes Helena looks at the way Alison smiles at her or how Kira holds her hand, Kira’s hand small and hot in hers, and realizes that they do not know: they don’t know how Danielle said _please_ and Janika laughed as she died, the sound like crows taking flight. To them, Helena’s back is unmarked, all that smooth and perfect skin.

To Sarah – Helena doesn’t know if it’s worse. Sarah’s seen Helena’s scars, Sarah had Helena’s knife pressed to her face and Helena – Helena should be grateful, that Sarah is willing to forgive her, that Sarah is willing to forget.

Helena should be grateful.

Helena _is_ grateful. But she can’t forget.

That doesn’t stop the days from passing, though, doesn’t stop Helena swallowing her words and howls. Every day she tries harder to force herself into a life she is not sure that she deserves, that blue sky, the pigeons that flap up in great gusts when she walks. It seems like Sarah has given her the keys to a house, pressed them into the hands of a woman covered in blood and said _It’s alright, just walk through it_. But Helena is bleeding bleeding bleeding and she doesn’t know what to _do—_

She imagines, sometimes, the break. They’ll be watching _Frozen_ again, or one of the other animated movies Sarah thinks Helena will like, and Sarah will send text messages to the man she kisses and as the sisters onscreen embrace, and forgive each other, Helena will lean forward and say “I killed them.” Say: Katja, say: Janika, say: Aryanna, she just wants to see if Sarah will still forgive her, she wants to see if Sarah will still love her, she wants to know if Sarah loves Helena at all or just the person Helena is trying to be.

(Helena can’t even bring herself to imagine it, but she _could_ : lean forward and say, “Sometimes I think about killing you.” It’s not a lie. Sometimes when Sarah wraps her arms around Helena she still does not know what else to do but lash out at Sarah, wrap her hands around Sarah’s throat. _Sometimes I think about killing you_. But when could she say that? When Sarah runs a brush through Helena’s hair, when she pulls Helena into Felix’s bed and cries, says _I’m so glad you’re okay, I’m so glad you’re my sister_?

It feels like everything is backwards. It feels like the longer Helena waits to cut her chest open and spill the black from it, the worse it is going to be. Sarah jumped straight to forgiving her, _Helena-please-put-down-the-gun_ , and Helena can’t question it for fear of that forgiveness being taken back but the black bubbles in her chest and she is wrong and broken and falling into little Helena-pieces, like a mirror punched by a little girl afraid of killing people with her face.)

Sometimes she imagines Sarah going all-over white as Helena spills wrongness like vomit, leans forward and keens out how it felt to plunge her knife into Amelia’s stomach, how their mother had grabbed Helena’s arm and Helena had not recognized that warm rough palm against her skin. When she does this she hits herself, over and over, which she’d promised herself at some point she would stop doing but has not stopped doing. When has she stopped deserving it? In her imagining Sarah hates Helena, for who Helena is, and it is like cutting your back open to praise God: relief, enough to make your bones shake. Relief, and shame, and pain so bright it feels like grabbing a star.

Sometimes dream-Helena can stop herself from saying _all_ the terrible things she’s done, and dream-Sarah says vague blurry things that are not nearly as bad as the things dream-Helena has done – because of the two of them Helena is worse, has always been worse, will always be worse just so Sarah can be better – but it is enough to make Helena feel like Sarah is leaning against her too, that the two of them are carrying each other, that they can patch up the wounds that are still bleeding.

But these are only imaginings. They move backwards, the forgiveness before the crime.

But these are only imaginings. Helena has learned confession, but it is easier to lay your sins before God than it is to lay them before your sister.

But these are only imaginings. Helena said _Please,_ sestra, _I need your help_ , and Sarah stayed mute when Helena cut her down. Sarah said nothing to Helena all the way down the stairs, not until they got to Felix’s apartment. She kept looking at Helena like she was not sure whether Helena was her salvation or her punishment.

(Helena wishes Sarah knew, because Helena does not know either.)

When Sarah dried the blood from behind her ear, Helena walked in quiet steps back to the body she’d left on the ground. She dipped her fingers in his blood and painted, on Rachel’s wall, herself and Sarah and Kira.

That is the difference between the two of them, maybe: Sarah cleans the blood up, and Helena sees in it the people she loves.

When Helena helped Sarah down the stairs, the blood dried on her fingers, on her dress, on her skin. Sarah said nothing, but Helena knew: she could scrub at her skin like Sarah did, but the blood wouldn’t really ever come off.

She held that secret to her chest as they limped together – as they limped, together, all the way home.

**Author's Note:**

> Woken up like an animal  
> Teeth ready for sinking  
> My mind's lost in bleak visions  
> I've tried to escape but keep sinking
> 
> Woken up like an animal  
> I'm all ready for healing  
> My mind's lost with nightmares streaming  
> Woken up (kicking screaming)  
> \--"Human," Daughter
> 
> Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed. Comments are writer-fuel. Without them, we _die_. We're like fairies in that respect.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
